<div class="gn-article"><div class="gn-hero gn-reveal"> <div class="gn-hero__image"><img src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6877701b88030d58f11ac053/6a609c48284536ec492fd7cd_built-for-yesterdays-traffic-ai-search-digital-pr-cover.jpg" alt=""></div> <div class="gn-hero__head"> <span class="gn-kicker"><span class="dot"></span>Expression</span> <h1 class="gn-title"><em>Playback:</em> Why AI Search Can't Find Your Brand, And What Digital PR Has to Do With It</h1> <div class="gn-meta"> <strong>The GO Network</strong> <span class="pip"></span> <span>30 July 2026</span> <span class="pip"></span> <span>9 min read</span> </div> </div> </div> <div class="gn-body"> <figure class="gn-fig gn-reveal"> <div class="gn-fig__media"> <div style="position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/1214277600" title="Playback: Why AI Search Can't Find Your Brand, And What Digital PR Has to Do With It" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe></div> </div> <figcaption>Playback: Why AI Search Can't Find Your Brand, And What Digital PR Has to Do With It</figcaption> </figure> <h2>PR Has Not Been Reinvented by GEO. Search Has Finally Caught Up With It.</h2> <p>The GO Network hosted a panel of Ryan Dean, Content Director at Jaywing, Cleo Chaisty, Head of Digital PR at I-COM, and Nick Ward, Managing Partner at Fire on the Hill, to unpack why AI search engines cite what they cite, and what that means for how brands should be running digital PR in 2026.</p> <p>Cleo Chaisty opened with the core shift: people are no longer scrolling through pages of search results, or even the top five organic listings. They are reading one summarised AI answer, and the language models producing that answer are trained on publicly available, trusted information. "If you're not getting in the press, if you're not in the press, you're not being served in the answer anymore," she said.</p> <p>What decides whether that content gets trusted, she explained, are the same signals digital PR has been building for years: authority, credibility, structure, and information that is well sourced and comes from an expert. That maps directly onto EEAT, Google's Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust framework, which has been core to search since 2022 and is now equally core to how AI systems decide who to cite. "PR as a discipline is not really being reinvented because of GEO," Chaisty said. "It's more that search has caught up with what we've been doing to reflect the value of it."</p> <p>AI is also, the panel agreed, sceptical of self-promotion. A brand telling its own story carries little weight with these systems. A third party, an independent journalist, or a trusted publication saying the same thing sends a far stronger signal. And digital PR, Chaisty was clear, still behaves like organic search rather than paid media: it is not lead generation, and it does not spike overnight. The impact comes from regular, credible coverage sustained over three, six, twelve, eighteen months.</p> <h2>From Link Building to Semantic Understanding</h2> <p>Nick Ward picked up the distinction between what digital PR used to deliver for SEO and what it now needs to deliver for GEO. Traditional search ranked sites on authority and backlinks, which made link building, "almost at all costs," the priority. AI engines work differently. They parse language with something much closer to human comprehension, which Ward described as "a real shot in the arm for traditional PR," because the industry's core skill, telling a comprehensive story credibly through third-party experts, is exactly what influences the engines now.</p> <p>"Content is absolutely king," Ward said. He gave the example of a 1,000-word article Fire on the Hill placed for a B2B tech client in a niche trade title, Ground Handling International, on airport IT system upgrades. Despite competitor efforts to cover the same ground, it remains one of the most cited pieces by AI engines on the subject. Ward's point: a small amount of genuine clarity in the right niche publication outperforms volume.</p> <p>He also flagged a stat worth treating carefully. Some reports claim earned media drives 80% of AI engine influence. Fire on the Hill's own analysis suggests that figure is too high. LinkedIn, Wikipedia and Reddit are all shaping the engines significantly too, which means brands need a broad strategy rather than a PR-only one.</p> <h2>Entity Consistency and the Content That Actually Earns Trust</h2> <p>Ryan Dean addressed how brands can understand whether they are being cited in LLMs, and which mentions matter. The starting point, he said, is accepting that AI search has changed what measurement looks like. Zero-click searches make it harder for agencies to justify their work and for clients to understand impact, so success needs redefining alongside the traditional traffic and session metrics that still matter.</p> <p>Practically, Dean pointed to Google's updated analytics for tracking AI Overview impressions, and to third-party tools like Semrush for tracking share of mentions and sentiment across ChatGPT, Gemini and other LLMs. One exercise he recommends to every client: ask an AI model directly what it thinks of your brand, its strengths, its weaknesses, what people associate with it. Paired with the data, that starts to reveal how AI is actually representing you.</p> <p>Nick Ward named the signal most often overlooked: entity consistency. AI engines maintain their own internal model of every brand or organisation they encounter, which makes a consistent story across every channel more important than it has ever been. Large B2B clients that have historically told different stories to different audiences are now recognising that fragmented narratives are a real liability in an AI-read world.</p> <p>Beyond consistency, Ward returned to content quality: does it genuinely answer the user's question, and is the person writing it actually qualified to? AI engines favour content that leads with the answer rather than burying it, that is chunked for easy reading, and that is substantiated with evidence and credible sources. And claims travel further when they appear consistently across multiple domains, your own site, other publications, partner sites, because that repetition is exactly what the engines use to spot and reinforce a message.</p> <h2>What Good Digital PR Looks Like in 2026</h2> <p>Asked what matters more for GEO between content, links, brand mentions or expertise, Cleo Chaisty's answer was a holistic mix, but with a clear starting point if resource is limited: name your spokesperson. That person needs to be real, with genuine industry experience, a dedicated biography page, a headshot, and an active LinkedIn profile. It makes placing their content with journalists significantly easier, because the first thing a journalist does is research the person behind the pitch. It is also exactly what LLMs weight when deciding who to trust.</p> <p>Ryan Dean built on this from the angle of internal experts. PR now requires access to people a degree closer to the actual business, the actuaries at a financial brand, the R&D team at an FMCG brand, not just a marketing spokesperson. Journalists are actively pushing back if the source is too far removed. He was candid that the real barrier is often internal logistics: finding subject matter experts who are comfortable being quoted, filmed, or interviewed, and building working processes that respect their time rather than treating this as an afterthought.</p> <p>Nick Ward described the strategic starting point as a single, clear organisational story: what you want audiences to take away about your brand over the next one to three years, and a GEO plan built to deliver it. He was blunt about where most brands currently sit: dipping a toe in, doing some measurement, running occasional outreach, without the comprehensive plan that moves the needle over time.</p> <p>Cleo Chaisty added a sharper filter for what counts as good PR content now: could a journalist find this on the first page of Google already? If so, it is not good enough. Commentary and thought leadership need to challenge conventional views or answer questions audiences are genuinely asking. "The content can't be safe. It can't be predictable. It can't be easy. Save that for your blog," she said. She also pointed to a real industry shift: Hearst, Reach and The Times have all publicly moved away from high-volume content strategies toward original, exclusive coverage, which changes what "good PR" needs to look like from the pitching side.</p> <h2>A Shrinking Media Landscape Makes Relationships More Valuable, Not Less</h2> <p>Ryan Dean addressed publisher downsizing directly. Smaller newsrooms and a rising share of freelance contributors mean fewer people at the pitch desks who can actually effect change, which makes named journalist relationships more important than they were during the high-volume link-building era. The ultimate goal, he said, is for journalists to come to your brand for comment, rather than agencies having to pitch cold every time.</p> <p>He also named a trend the panel has watched build over recent months: "churnalism," the high-volume, flood-the-internet content strategy many major publishers ran for the past five to ten years, giving way to smaller, more specialised outlets gaining influence with AI engines. That is not a bad thing for brands willing to be genuinely relevant to smaller, targeted publications rather than chasing scale alone.</p> <p>Asked for the single biggest thing most brands are missing right now, Nick Ward returned to strategic clarity: a defined organisational story, planned deliberately with GEO in mind, executed as a multi-year plan rather than isolated activity.</p> <h2>No, AI Cannot Run Your Digital PR Campaign</h2> <p>Put directly, can a brand create an AI-generated digital PR campaign? Cleo Chaisty's answer: "The short answer is no." AI is genuinely useful for research, for pinpointing trends, running data analysis, and processing survey or FOI data that used to take her a week to work through manually. What it cannot do is what makes coverage citable in the first place: genuine expert insight and human judgement.</p> <p>Journalists, she said, are highly attuned to AI-generated pitches, and a reputation for sending AI-written comments, press releases or images will land a brand on block lists fast. AI can help draft a first pass or suggest subject line variations for different publication tones, but every word going to a journalist needs a human hand on it. "Whatever you do, do not use AI to write your emails," she said. "That is a surefire way to burn all of your bridges."</p> <h2>Digital PR Cannot Work in Isolation From Everything Else</h2> <p>Ryan Dean closed the channel discussion by pointing out that customers do not experience a brand through internal service lines. They move across Reddit, LLMs, TikTok and a brand's own website without noticing where PR ends and social begins. What differentiates a brand in a category like tech retail, where the product itself is identical everywhere, is the brand, the people, and how consistently that shows up.</p> <p>That consistency has to be structural, not aspirational. SEO teams optimising toward one commercial goal while a social team reports into brand and runs a completely different long-term agenda produces mismatched signals, both to customers and to the LLMs building a model of the brand. Review scores, Reddit presence and social activity are all cited by AI engines alongside PR coverage, which means, as Dean put it, "your social teams are kind of doing part of your SEO for you." Budget lines and team structures need to reflect that reality rather than fight it.</p> <h2>Building Authority Is a Multi-Year Commitment, Not a Campaign</h2> <p>Closing the session, Nick Ward addressed timeline directly. Building the kind of authority AI search recognises is, in his words, "not easy." It is consistent effort over time: building trust with journalists, up-weighting the quality and volume of output, and gradually earning audience recognition. That requires the same strategic plan raised throughout the session, executed over time rather than treated as a single push.</p> <p>He was honest about the range of outcomes. For one client facing limited competitive activity, Fire on the Hill moved GEO visibility five percent in a few months. For larger organisations in more contested categories, the timeline stretches significantly further. His advice either way: start measuring now, because if you are not tracking your AI search visibility, the honest answer to whether you are competitive is probably no.</p> <p>Across the session, the panel's message held together without contradiction. AI search has not created a new discipline. It has made the fundamentals of good digital PR, real expertise, credible third-party validation, and sustained relationships with journalists, more valuable than they have been in years. The brands treating this as a quick technical fix are going to be the ones left out of the answer.</p> </div></div>